I had to go half way across the country to PA in order to see the new stuff in the Target Dollar Spot, but it was worth it! Check out the cute stuff I found!

I think I am going to put letters on these out in the hall where we display our work...or maybe put my name outside my classroom with them. These jars were cute, I have no other excuse for purchasing them, but I thought maybe they could hold paper clips, thumbtacks, etc.

We use these dry erase pockets all the time for centers! I dont't take a grade for center work, so I make 4-5 copies of the center paper and slide them in the dry erase pockets to be reused.

These little buckets look like pencils. (They had notebook paper ones too, but the two Targets I went to only had one each.) I am going to use them for my professional development workshop that. I am putting on at the end of July for a neighboring district. I am so excited for this opportunit as it is the first time that I will be presenting outside of my school! I am going …

I'm baaaaaaaack!!! The Little Man had an ear infection for about a month. (Not joking!) Then, the day after school let out my mom finally came for a visit! So summer break has been busy already! I'm sorry I have been M.I.A., but life happens and summer break with The Little Man is priority numero uno! Have you forgotten he doesn't sleep? Saturday he took a 10 minute morning nap and a 13 minute afternoon nap. The kid literally hits himself to stay awake, he hates sleeping!!!! Needless to say, I do what I can, when I can. We have company coming next week, my mom comes back two weeks after that to celebrate The Little Man's first birthday and then he and I are heading home with her to visit for a week. Hopefully, I can use this summer to get re-energized and find my groove again.
I redid my entire word wall for next year. Last year, I had sight words and vocabulary words listed under each letter, but the kiddos didn't use it unless we were having a spellin…

I am so thankful for all of my followers and wanted to show you just how much I appreciate you so I made everything in my store 20% off and if you use the code "thankyou" you can get an additional 10% off!

STEM Night was a success! We had over 200 people show up. We served them dinner and then they headed out to explore the upper elementary classrooms. Each room had a STEM project in it for them to work on. Then, everyone gathered in the gym for a brief chat to welcome everyone and thank them for coming. The families then dispersed to their grade level challenges. I was in charge of bottle rockets! They were so exciting! The families really got into it! We had one that went 35 feet!

The bottle rockets were made by rolling paper to form a straw. The kiddos then attached the paper straw to a flexible drinking straw and attached the plastic straw onto a ketchup squirt bottle. (One with a pointy nozzle.) The kiddos used card stock to make wings. We launched them down the hallway and almost ran out of room!

Here is an awesome blog post if you aren't ready to jump in and get the book.

Here are a few of the activities we did. Click on the pictures to see corresponding blog po…

I had a request for a Facebook page so that was today's project! I have thought about a Facebook page for a long time now, but couldn't justify the time commitment. Leave it to my new coworkers to convince me otherwise.

https://www.facebook.com/whoisonfirst

I promise to post articles that will make you think and others that will make you laugh. If you don't have a sense of humor and a passion for teaching then this isn't the place for you.

I have been so busy at school! It is difficult for me to find my place in new situations, but I am trying to make the best of it.

I got to put on my first professional development! Our school started using Google Classroom and it is awesome! I was able to modify it for the primary teachers so that even they can use Google Forms.

We had conferences last week. Every semester I am surprised. Let's just leave it at that.

Our school is hosting a STEM night tomorrow night and I got to design the posters that we put up around…

Those 2 a.m. feedings became a great time to plan. I know it sounds crazy, but it helped me relax because I could either sit there and worry about how unprepared I was or actually get myself prepared. It also helped me stay awake while I was nursing The Little Man so that I didn't fall asleep and drop him or something crazy like that.
I had boards that looked like this:

But with over 5,000 pins on my boards, they were not very helpful. So then, I did this:

I created a board for each standard! It has made things so much easier. When I am typing up my plans for the week, I pull up Pinterest and away I go. What did we do before Pinterest? Follow Me On Pinterest

My biggest challenge with starting a new grade level at a new school was not having a plan! I hate not being prepared well in advance. Before I left my old school, I had already made all of my copies for the upcoming year so that all I had to do was show up and teach and do a little grading now and then. I didn't want to waste valuable hours standing in front of a copier when I could be at home snuggling The Little Man. So, when I accepted this new position I started asking a LOT of questions. I'm sure I annoyed my teammates, but a girl has got to have a plan.

First, I made a calendar for the school year with all of our days off blacked out. Then I started plugging in all of my information. This is what I call a "living document". I am constantly tweaking it here and there. (Like when I found out we had guidance one day a week and gifted and talented one day a week, so I could only teach writing three days a week. Then fast forward to the second semester w…

We have a little LOT of trouble remembering what we read. We tend to recite the words on a page and not bother to process anything. When the questioning standard came around I scoured Pinterest to find an activity to hold my kids accountable. We focus on each standard for a week (and then review in small groups of course). This week, I chose a book for each day and traced these giant thought bubbles onto butcher paper. I asked my kiddos to come up with a question either before, during, or after reading. They got so excited when they realized I was writing it on the thought bubble. They were proud of their questions, and showed ownership. They were finally listening and thinking! We put them up in the hall for a while and they had fun pointing out their questions to their friends in other classrooms. I know it's simple, but it was worth it! They woke up and realized what it truly means to read.

Gotta love Pinterest! I found this cute idea for The Little Man's first Christmas. She wrapped 24 books and they opened one each night and read them. Thanks to Scholastic's Reading Club, I got my books for free! It was so fun to watch The Little Man open a book each night. I think we might do it for his birthday month too.

Our Writing of The Month topic for December was descriptive. It is so important for kiddos to be able to enhance their writing with powerful descriptive adjectives. As you know, accomplishing much of anything in December is rather challenging. I found this cute idea on TPT:

So we created our own For Sale ads for gingerbread houses. We prefaced the unit with talks and books about adjectives:

Then we got to the fun part...talking about candy! The kiddos had to write descriptive words about candy in each of the boxes on this graphic organizer.

Then, they could decide what was special about their gingerbread house. We shared a few ideas to help the kiddos who were stuck.
After creating a rough draft and editing, we published our work on this cute paper and got to work creating our gingerbread houses with the template from Keeping Life Creative. I even went as far as creating chocolate bar doors and Oreo windows (using clip art) for my kiddos who got especially creative.

It is finally done! I started working on this project in June! I thought it would never be done! I am so excited with how it turned out! I will make you a deal...I will give it to you for free if you blog about it before January 31st!
1) Blog about it and include a link to it in my TPT shop
2) Comment below with the link to your blog post and your email address
3) I will email it you!

Our school has implemented a "Writing Of The Month". Each month a type of writing is chosen and focused on by the entire school (even Pre-K). They haven't had a strong focus on writing in the past, so I have decided to have fun with it. I try to incorporate a project with each writing piece so that the kiddos have something else to look forward to. Boy do I have some writers in my room! November's topic was opinion or persuasive.
We read the following books:

I then had my kiddos choose what animals they wanted to write about and copied the book pages for them. They had to find at least three reasons they wanted that hair or those teeth. They had so much fun! Then we made this cute little craftivity to go along with it, thanks to a couple other teacher bloggers. Oceans of First Grade FunFirst Grade Fairytales